A world of clashing emotions?

“All books about revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people”, wrote Ryszard Kapuscinski. “They should begin with a psychological chapter, one that shows how a harassed and terrified man suddenly breaks his terror [and] stops being afraid.”

Dominique Moïsi is not a reporter, as Kapuscinski was, but he does see the importance of individual feelings, collective emotions and how dynamic change can be. While Kapuscinski sought to capture a moment of transformation – Iran’s revolution in 1979 – Moïsi tries to map out the primary emotions that helped transform the world over two decades, from November 1989 to November 2008.

Like Kapuscinski, Moïsi seeks – and finds – an antidote to academe, his milieu for decades. But Moïsi also wants to provide an antidote to one specific academic, Samuel Huntington, and the ‘disease’ that he has spread, the notion of a ‘clash of civilisations’. Moïsi’s challenge was more direct when he wrote an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The clash of emotions”, which was the prototype for this book. But here, too, it is evident that his disagreement with Huntington has a catalysing force.

That bête noire demonstrates the importance of the corrective that Moïsi seeks to offer. He wants to help inoculate us against a repetition of the over-ambition and over-reaction of George W. Bush’s neo-conservatives, whom Daniel Cohn-Bendt, the French Green MEP, famously described as “Bolsheviks of democracy”. They championed Huntington, but he later disavowed them. Moïsi’s focus on competing emotions rules out the determinism. His focus on us as emotional beings shows how history affects us, rather than promotes us as bearers of some historical destiny. And his elevation of universal emotions rather than universal values means that he can disregard a tough question: how should we promote those values?

The world’s emotional climate

Moïsi suggests that two developments have changed the world’s emotional climate: the end of the Cold War (“we are going to do something terrible to you; we are going to disappear as a threat”, Aleksandr Yakovlev, an ally of Mikhail Gorbachev, warned the West) and then globalisation. But in the nesting egg of emotions generated by those changes (Moïsi’s image), three are larger: hope, fear and humiliation. And they in turn nest inside another emotion: self-confidence.

It is a daring assertion, all the more so because Moïsi claims that hope dominates in Asia, humiliation in the Middle East and fear in the West. But it seems less daring and more pertinent as the pages roll by. First, the symptoms are familiar; it is the diagnosis that is challenging. Second, over a lifetime as a global intellectual Moïsi has put together a mosaic that is coherent. And, third, his personality helps: Moïsi is a “passionate moderate” who, despite a “lifelong concern with ethics”, is not prescriptive. On this elevated plane, ego is a danger, but he presents a self-assured Olympian view without succumbing to the temptation to become Delphic.

Still, a map alone might be too two-dimensional for those readers who accept Moïsi’s argument and frustrating for those who want a guide. Perhaps sensing this, he extends his map out to 2025. But, rather than play the role of the soothsayer, Moïsi offers two visions, of a dark age of fear and of a more hopeful world. He goes farther, by making suggestions about how to create the more self-confident world. But his policy prescriptions are brief and nest inside emotions: change, to preserve yourself; to beat intolerance, embrace knowledge; and cultivate optimism, but imbue it with a sense of the tragic.

Fact File

The geopolitics of emotion

How cultures of fear, humiliation, and hope are reshaping the world By Dominique Moïsi, 199 pages Doubleday, €17.49

Rather than play the role of the soothsayer, Moïsi offers two visions, of a dark age of fear and of a more hopeful world. He goes farther, by making suggestions about how to create the more

In the end, there perhaps remains a gap between the book’s ambition and its brevity. But fittingly, but importantly, Moïsi brings more than an argument. While he casts off the ballast of detail and footnotes, Moïsi adds the weight of experience in what is, ultimately, a profoundly personal essay. In a dedication echoed in his conclusion, he writes: “To the memory of my father, Jules Moïsi, number 159721 in Auschwitz, who survived extreme fear and humiliation to teach me hope.”

Perhaps, then, his parting ‘prescription’ is that if billions of people make a similar journey towards hopeful self-confidence, our geopolitics will be better.